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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Dredd 3D

I know, I know, things have been very slow lately. The good news is that I should soon have a roundup of the rest of September's films but, for now, my take on this year's most surprising comic book film.Also at Channel 24

What it's about

In the future, the
only thing that stands between Mega City One, a decaying,
ultra-violent metropolis, and total chaos are the Judges – a select
group of law enforcement agents who are given the power to act as
judge, jury and executioner. The ruthless, uncompromising Judge Dredd
is the city's most feared and revered Judge, but when Dredd and Judge
Anderson, a rookie judge he is in the process of field testing, go
after a particularly malicious drug dealer/ crime boss, the hunters
soon become the pray as they finds themselves trapped in a
locked-down city block with a price on their heads and scores of
cut-throat criminals on their tails.

What we thought

In a year when you
have The Avengers, Batman and Spider-man dominating this year's box
office, it would be all to easy to overlook this far smaller, far
more unassuming comic book movie. Judge Dredd is about as big as
British comic book characters go, but even then, we're hardly talking
Batman or Spider-man levels of international recognition here. Worse,
those who are familiar with Dredd already have to find some way to
get past the awful 1990s Stallone adaptation that not only had Dredd
committing the cardinal sin of removing his helmet, but made use of
the terminally unfunny Rob Schneider as “comic” relief. Plus, to
be brutally honest, the trailer did nothing to suggest that Dredd 3D,
with its over-use of slow motion and macho violence, would be that
much of an improvement on its daft predecessor.

It's probably
damning the film with faint praise then, to say that Dredd 3D is a
very pleasant surprise, but it really is precisely that. Rather than
taking on the DC and Marvel blockbusters head-on, Dredd comes in as a
grimy and gritty alternative to the epic optimism that characterizes
all, or at least the best, superhero films. It's a low-budget South
African/ British co-production that was largely shot in Cape Town and
Johannesburg (future America is apparently overrun by minibus taxis)
with only three moderately successful stars at the centre of it.

The best thing
about Dredd s just how stripped-down and, fittingly, uncompromising
it is. There really isn't a whole lot of plot beyond what was already
described in the above synopsis, but rather than being to the film's
detriment, its simplicity allows for a taught, claustrophobic and
intense action film that does everything that it set out to do in
just over an hour and a half.

It probably helps
that Dredd himself is played as less a character and more as an
unstoppable force of nature – the true heart of the film is Olivia
Thirby's psychic and sympathetic Judge Anderson – but Dredd 3D fits
so much into its running time that it works both as an introduction
to Mega City One and its Judges and as a perfectly satisfying action
thriller with enough time devoted to its characters to make you care
about what's going on on screen. How many scifi/ fantasy action films
currently on circuit can you say that about?

For
someone who hasn't been directing feature films for very long, Pete
Travis directs with plenty of style and a good eye for effective and
rather gory action set pieces. Considering that no one would ever
believe that Dredd wouldn't come out of the film kicking and snarling
and that the nature of the plot means that the action could so easily
get very repetitive very fast, Travis's ability to keep things
suspenseful and intense throughout is nothing to be sneered at. Even
the potentially annoying slo-mo of the trailer is quickly revealed to
have an actual purpose as much of the plot revolves around a drug
that causes its users to experience the world at 1/100th
their normal speed.

Of course, he was
working with one of the industry's better scriptwriters, Alex Garland
who before adapting Kazuo Ishiguro's very novelistic Never Let Me Go
into a very fine screenplay, cut his teeth working with the great
Danny Boyle. Here he has the challenge of making the fundamentally
fascistic Judge Dredd into a sympathetic anti-hero but, by
emphasising just how far gone Mega City One's is, he allows the
audience to gain at least some appreciation for the Judges and the
world in which they operate. By having on hand so adept a
screenwriter as Alex Garland, Dredd is able to make the best of its
b-movie trappings without ever falling prey to them.

The film already
has excellent pedigree behind the cameras, but the talent on screen
are no less impressive. Thirby has finally been given a role worthy
of her talents after being the best thing in what is otherwise a
pretty awful string of films. Lena Headey has proven to be very, very
good at playing bad and, eve if her character here has none of the
complexity of the one she plays on Game of Thrones, she more than
makes up for it by cranking the bonkers, malicious nastiness all the
way up to eleven.

And then, of
course, there is Karl Urban who is simply sensational as the title
character. Considering that he has to do all his acting with the
bottom third of his face, he is a memorable and magnetic screen
presence who plays Dredd with the required mixture of dark, utterly
deadpan humour and unshakable stoicism. Forget the frankly campy
Stallone, this is Dredd as he was always meant to be.

It's not the
smartest, the meatiest or the deepest film you will see this year,
but Dredd 3D (incidentally, the 3D is OK at best) is the one movie to
watch if you want to see just how satisfying an experience shameless
b-movies can be when they have the right people and the right
intentions involved.

About This Blog and Its Author

My name is Ilan Preskovsky and I've been working as a journalist/ writer/ critic for the past six (?!) years. When I'm not writing feature articles for Jewish Life Magazine or trying to scrounge up work like every other poor freelancer, I like to write about movies - and, indeed, sometimes even watch them. I write about them both professionally, as a critic for Channel 24, and as an amateur enthusiast for this site. I also love comic books, music, novels, certain non-fiction books and TV and I may even write about them from time to time.

This here blog (named with all the swagger and bubbly self-confidence for which I am barely known) is simply a collection of my various writings, both professional and amateur, and therefore should be taken as the opinions of one man and one man only. This man, of course, in case you were wondering, is a middle class, South African, (Modern) Orthodox Jew with a rather unhealthy love for pop culture and passionate, humanist writing. But, hey, isn't everyone?

Because Everybody Else Has One is consistently inconsistently updated and is no doubt full of errors when not edited properly, but do feel free to leave comments, both about specific posts and the site in general, and let me know what you think. Agree? Disagree? Want to burn my house down with me in it (I'm looking at you Underworld fans)? Bring it on. Bring it all on.